Well the picture shows a large impact on the passenger side of the red sedan. My guess is that the red sedan was headed north onto 35W and the black SUV was headed westbound on 4th St. Looks like after the collision, the red sedan spun clockwise since it was hit slightly toward the rear. Most likely the result of one of the two of them running a red light.

wide lane widths and highway-like design creates the false sense of security that one should be able to speed at 45 mph+ through this area, which is a fairly dense residential/commercial area with lots of cyclists and pedestrians. it's criminal.

Loaded with "domestic dispute" type stuff you'd find in an episode of Cops, where an ex-girlfriend repeatedly rams her car into the car of her ex-boyfriend driving his new girlfriend. Train wreck funny, but damn.

You know, the inverse of this I see all the time, when I'm driving alone I see vehicle after vehicle that could be using the lane ... not using it and slugging along in normal traffic with the lane wide open for miles upon miles. I wonder if people who don't use it, but could, don't use it because they're confused how it works, where you enter and exit, and don't want to get stuck in it.

Quick question: I've read a few stories this year harping on the fact that Minnesotans are terrible at using the full length of the extra lane during a merging scenario and that utilizing the full capacity of the extra lane greatly increases the capacity of the road and reduces travel times. Could/should this logic be applied to the HOV lane as well? Would highway traffic be as bad if we were actually using all lanes fully? I mean it's true: three/four lanes of stop-and-go and one lane completely free and clear. There's got to be a better medium between all this wasted space and providing efficient bus/hov travel.

In the short term, if HOV lanes were made general-purpose, you'd have four lanes of stop-and-go traffic that lasted a shorter period of time. But in the longer term you'd simply run into induced demand again, and stop-and-go would last just as long as it did before, but now buses would be trapped in it.

The truth is that highway traffic here just isn't that bad, relatively speaking. In places like Los Angeles or DC with much worse congestion, the HOV lanes get far higher use. So high, in fact, that they end up gridlocked a good percentage of the time as well.

If anything, I think we should be moving towards a 2 lane HOV configuration on many highways where we've expanded to a 3+HOV config (such as 35E north of DT St. Paul, or I-94 between the downtowns would be a good candidate).